Extra Post 2

My growth as a collaborator and a learner has grown tremendously over the time in this course. I have a much better understanding of online collaboration and I have become more open and willing to learn about this online collaboration through my time spent in this course. When looking back at all my posts from the semester, I can see a difference in how my thoughts have changed. I have gone from understand the simplistic ways of online collaboration to getting into more detailed intel on what collaboration really means.

When I first started posting I posted about online collaboration in general and what I thought it meant to me, then I started to progress my knowledge about it and talk about the specifics of collaboration such as open source and now I am applying this to the many examples of online collaboration we see every day like the black lives matter movement. I really think that everyone as a class did a great job of growing and expanding their knowledge of becoming an online collaborator in the class. Specifically there are a couple of students who I think exemplified this very well and would like to give them credit for their outstanding blogs and growth throughout this course.

These students blogs are linked below:
Ana Salido
Nicolette Adams
Klaudia Kendall

All of these students were outstanding on their blog posts all semester and showed their growth throughout the semester!

Extra Post 1

Today in class we made up tasks for our unit 3 projects. Our project focused on giving back during the holidays by using the codes at the bottom of hydro flasks. Many people do not know about these codes that give back to one of the 12 charities of their choice listed on the hydro flask page. We thought it would be a good way to spread the holiday cheer this winter by implementing giving a hydro flask and giving back to the community at the same time. For us tasks were not hard to set, we felt that the tasks we assigned would be both important and actionable if implemented into the real world.

I think we have a great concept that really works and many people don’t even have to buy a hydro flask to give back because they already own one. So giving back doesn’t have to feel like a huge chore and it is easily and obtainable to do. People also want this as a gift because it is a little pricey so more often than not they tend to give the hydro flask as a gift, which works with our project and furthers our tasks even more. I think these tasks if implemented in a real life scenario would do a great job of spreading joy and giving back to the community.

These are the ways I was able to contribute to the other groups tasks with hope phone:

Week 10

This is the last blog for ESOC 211, so I wanted to make a reflection of my time in this course and all of the things that I have learned in this course. I learned the importance and the struggle of having online collaborations and communities through this course. More importantly, I learned how we interact with each other in these online portals and how it varies from real life interaction. We went into depth about copyright and collaboration of people through whom we haven't even met. When you think about it, online collaboration and communities are really cool and there isn't really anything like it.

I think another important topic we talked about was algorithms and filter bubbles. This shows how we are deceived through the internet. We don't all get the same information and we are involved in different communities. I think a lot of times we assume that we will be exposed to more on the internet because it is a vast portal with a ton of information but in reality the internet is really limiting in the information that we get exposed to. This being said, it is no different than our communication and communities that we share in person.

Overall I really enjoyed this class, it was really interesting and I learned a lot about current news and how we as a society communicate and connect with each other in online portals.

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Week 9

One thing that we did in this class was discuss a lot about social media news, what is trending and why it is important to the online community. I thought this was really the backbone to this class and really enjoyed speaking about the trending stories. It helped me be more current with the news and it also opened my eyes a lot about what was going on in the world. Especially when it came to my own filter bubble and the things that I only see on my web searches. I was able to get out of that bubble by listening to what other trending stories others in my class had found. I was able to be exposed to all types of news through this method.

It was especially interesting this semester the news that was provided everyday in class because of the presidential election. There were a lot of articles involving politics which I particularly enjoyed as someone who doesn't normally engage with politics. I was able to see many of the stories I would normally not search for on my own time. This made a class about online communities become more engaged in offline activities. I liked the mix of having us interact online with each other as well as offline. It provided a great way for us to communicate about trending and important topics.

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Week 8

This week we learned about hashtags and how they can promote a specific topic. In particular, the lesson we learned was about hashtags and how they have correlated with the Black Lives Matter Movement. And how hashtags have fathered and progressed this movement in the online community. The lecture described two functions of a hashtag. The first function is the, "coordinating signal of commonality." The second function is that hashtags are, "discursively fungible, exchangeable, or flexible." It was expressed in this lecture that hashtags are both good and bad to the online community.

Hashtags can be used to create good and bad messages and spread helpful and hurtful things to the online community. Hashtags offer a structure to the craziness of the online portal but it also offers a way for certain subjects to dominate the web. Hashtags can start a movement or they can be used just for the fun of things. They show what is trending and what is important to the online communities. They can be used to express feelings of serious events as well as hear warming events. They categorize a certain topic and as people talk about this subject with the hashtags you are able to see the trend as well as what people are thinking about this particular subject. It is one way the Internet is able to organize everyones thoughts and feelings.

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